Life Time Contracts: Social Long-term Contracts in Labour, Tenancy and Consumer Credit Law

This book deals with lifetime contracts, a group of contracts which generally have the most important role to play in people's daily lives and existence. These contracts establish social long-term relations which, with regard to certain periods of the lifetime of individuals, provide essential goods, services, as well as labor and income opportunities for self-realization and participation. The book questions the general principles of European contract law built onto the classical model of sales contracts. It argues that a general life time contract should be integrated into the codification of modern private law, and it proposes a set of principles governing such social long-term relations. Divided in five parts (Introduction; Lifetime in Contract Law; Labor Contracts; Consumer Credit Contracts; and Residential Tenancy Contracts), the book is the result of annual discussion meetings that took place between 2006-2013. Twenty-one members of the EuSoCo.eu research group from eleven countries participated in a multi-cultural project to provide a contractual model for the credit and service economy of the 21st century.

Luca Nogler has been Professor of Labour and Employment Law and of Comparative Labour Law at the University of Trento (Italy) since 2001, where he has been the Director of the Department of Legal Sciences (2003 to 2008) and the Dean of the Faculty of Law (2009 to 2012). Udo Reifner is Professor of Commercial Law at the University of Trento and Director of the Institute for Financial Services, Hamburg. He studied sociology and law in Berlin and Marburg.